Sylvia Plath

and Meghan Curtin

Ryan Biery, Billy Foshay

Biographical (1932-1963)

• Frequent financial troubles• Father died • Feminist through college• Depression• Married, lost focus• Attempted suicide• Bell jar• Final suicide

“Sylvia Plath's suicide, which some critics read as her last, inevitable poem, has led most critics to assume a greater degree of fulfillment and

completion in her work than it can justly claim…”

Themes

• Death• Violence• Depression• Suicide• Isolation• Pessimism• Self-Destruction

“…many of them written during the final, turbulent weeks of her life, read as

if they’ve been chiseled, with a fine surgical instrument, out of arctic ice…”

Motifs

• Darkness• Blood (“Cut”)• God• Glory• Outdoor Setting • Colors (black, red, white)

“The passive, paralyzed, continually surfacing and fading consciousness of Sylvia Plath in her poems is disturbing to us because it seems to summon

forth, to articulate with deadly accuracy….”

Motivation

• Separation anxiety• Genetic depression• Strong sense of feminism• Lack of fame• Father’s death • Attempted suicide

“Sylvia Plath has made beautiful poetry out of the paranoia sometimes expressed by a certain kind of emotionally disturbed person, who

imagines that any relationship with anyone will overwhelm him, engulf

and destroy his soul.”

Literary Devices

• Allusion (ex. Nazis)• Slant rhyme• End rhyme• Obsessive Repetition• Motifs • Imagery

“Individual poems are best read in the context of the whole oeuvre: motifs, themes and images link poems together and these linkages illuminate their

meaning and heighten their power…”

“Cinderella”

The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels,Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fanOf silver as the rondo slows; now reels

Begin on tilted violins to spanThe whole revolving tall glass palace hall

Where guests slide gliding into light like wine;Rose candles flicker on the lilac wallReflecting in a million flagons' shine,And glided couples all in whirling tranceFollow holiday revel begun long since,

Until near twelve the strange girl all at onceGuilt-stricken halts, pales, clings to the prince

As amid the hectic music and cocktail talkShe hears the caustic ticking of the clock.

“Cut”What a thrill ---

My thumb instead of an onion.The top quite gone

Except for a sort of a hingeOf skin,

A flap like a hat,Dead white.

Then that red plush.Little pilgrim,

The Indian's axed your scalp.Your turkey wattle

Carpet rollsStraight from the heart.

I step on it,Clutching my bottle

Of pink fizz.A celebration, this is.

Out of a gapA million soldiers run,Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?

O myHomunculus, I am ill.

I have taken a pill to killThe thin

Papery feeling.Saboteur,

Kamikaze man ---The stain on yourGauze Ku Klux Klan

BabushkaDarkens and tarnishes and

whenThe balled

Pulp of your heartConfronts its small

Mill of silenceHow you jump ---Trepanned veteran,

Dirty girl,Thumb stump.

“The Life”collector:

They ring true, like good china.

Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.

The light falls without letup, blindingly.

A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle

About a bald hospital saucer.It resembles the moon, or a

sheet of blank paperAnd appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.

She lives quietlyWith no attachments, like a

foetus in a bottle,The obsolete house, the sea,

flattened to a pictureShe has one too many dimensions

to enter.Grief and anger, exorcised,

Leave her alone now.The future is a grey seagullTattling in its cat-voice of

departure.Age and terror, like nurses,

attend her,And a drowned man, complaining

of the great cold,Crawls up out of the sea.

Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,

This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.

Here's yesterday, last year ---Palm-spear and lily distinct as

flora in the vastWindless threadwork of a tapestry.

Flick the glass with your fingernail:

It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir

Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.

The inhabitants are light as cork,Every one of them permanently

busy.At their feet, the sea waves bow

in single file.Never trespassing in bad temper:

Stalling in midair,Short-reined, pawing like

paradeground horses.Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled

and fancyAs Victorian cushions. This familyOf valentine faces might please a

Criticism• “Beautiful…”• “Saintly…”• “[Unnecessarily] heavy verbs…” • “Intensified…”• “Zany, accurate and unexpected…”• “Sylvia Plath's suicide, which some critics read as her last, inevitable poem…”

• “…eccentric imagination”• “Strange..”• “Startling expressions”• “Redemption”

We Agree...

• “Saintly…”

• “Zany, accurate and unexpected…”

• “Intensified…”

• “…eccentric imagination”

• “Strange..”

• “Redemption”

We Disagree…

• “Beautiful…”

• “[Unnecessarily] heavy verbs…”

• “Accurate”

• “Startling expressions”

There is no human glory, no salvation except death.

Works CitedAmerican poets, 1880-1945, first series. Detroit, Mich: Gale Research Co., 1986.

Giles, James, ed. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 152. The Gale Group, 1995.

Mendelson, Riley, ed. Contemporary Literary Critisism. Vol. 5. Gale Research Company.

"The Poetry of Sylvia Plath." Stanford University. 01 Apr. 2009

<http://www.stanford.edu/class/engl187/docs/plathpoem.html>.

Steinberg, Peter K. Sylvia Plath. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004.

"Sylvia Plath." 01 Apr. 2009 <http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC?

vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=wmmhs_ca&srchtp=athr&ca

=1&c=1&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13031637&n=10&docNum=H1000078643&ST=sylvia+plath&bC

onts=16047>.

"Sylvia Plath." 01 Apr. 2009

<http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC?

vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=wmmhs_ca&srchtp=athr&ca

=1&c=4&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13031637&n=10&docNum=H1200000441&ST=sylvia+plath&bC

onts=16047>.